Instead we’ll have to ”progressively invade” strategic locales in order to increase our influence over the city. The team want us to feel we’re ‘building our own hacking system’.
A usual trope for open worlds of this kind was to keep a player confined to certain areas until specific criteria have been met, but now freedom of movement is King.
”You can go anywhere you want. We are not restricting the player,” said creative director Jonathan Morin.
”Within the free-roaming the player will have to progressively invade certain strategic points from the city OS system that’s going to make it possible for him to get connected in a district,” he explained, referring to Aiden. ”It’s going to grow and we call this “monitoring grid”. It’s like its own network to listen to what’s going on in the city. That unlocks tons of different side activities and events that the system can detect so we can actually go and intervene into them.”
“We really wanted the player, through the free-roaming, to feel that he is building his own hacking system,” continued Morin. “It would have been a bit weird and magical to just have it.”
Watch Dogs releases on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 November 19th in the US, 22nd in EU.